Better Products Often Fail (and we’re all worse off for it) | Hacker News Reader

Better Products Often Fail (and we’re all worse off for it)

abortretry.fail

20 pointscpeterso21 comments

This is just a poor analysis. By the time it came out, DRDOS was irrelevant. The G4 cube was expensive, and comparatively slow, and unreliable. The Zune had some extra features that were irrelevant to most users, a poor ecosystem and was quickly outclassed as the iPod continued to develop. WebOS definitely had some pioneering UI features, but developing apps in JavaScript was fatal for performance. Windows Phone did use flat design rather than skeuomorphism, and this was clearly the way things were going, but the platform as a whole was simply wasn’t better than the iPhone, which simply shifted to flat design soon afterwards.

These products just weren’t better. They had one or two features that were better, and that’s it.

Windows Phone was a huge paradigm shift from an iPhone or Android. The windows phone was a phone first, and a computer second. It would try to allow you to have access to the phone for as long as possible. Android and iPhone had no native battery saving features at the time, but windows phone did! It was great for those of us who went without power for extended periods of time.

The reason it didn’t take was obvious if you spent 10 minutes inside a cell phone store with comments like “you don’t want that phone because there aren’t any apps.” That was true, to an extent. However it had all the apps you’d ever need and some unofficial ones that blew the official ones on other platforms out of the water. Literally, people were attracted to it but were sold something else after being told all the negatives without the positives (the best camera at the time, surround sound recording, etc). That’s why it failed, nothing to do with “features” just sales people given higher commissions to sell something else.

I don’t know anything about the other things.

Blaming it on lack of apps is easy, but why is that?

My hypothesis is that MS did the same thing with Windows Phone as Google does with chat platforms.

MS had Windows Mobile 6.5. It had glorious phones like the HTC Diamond and the HTC HD2. It competed with the iPhone and Android, but it was steadily loosing because the UX essentially belonged to a different era, one where resistive touchscreens and styluses were the norm. WM 6.5 survived many many years afterwards

MS drops WM 6.5 and replaces it with Windows Phone 7 with no upgrade path, no compatibility, no migration path and no native apps(only CLR). Phones were cool even if technically limited.

MS then drops WP 7 (up to 7.8) and replaces it with WP 8. Again no upgrade path and only partial compatibility but at least we finally have native apps (and games). By this point the race was lost. People were no longer willing to invest in the platform and already iOS and Android were a long distance ahead. Phones were already lagging behind Android counterparts with few flagships. MS was also suffering because of Qualcomm.

MS finally released WM 10 and it was finally a really nice OS that just lacked apps, even from Microsoft themselves which started to release apps on Android and iOS first or only. Microsoft also slowly lost its hardware partners after it bought the biggest one, Nokia. The only phones were Lumias from MS and 1 phone from HP. At this point everyone saw it as a dead platform with a cult following. At the end, it was a really nice OS.

MS gives up, uses Android on the Surface Duo (which was made for Windows Mobile) and signs a partnership with Samsung to preload MS apps on Galaxy phones.

Meanwhile, you could upgrade an iPhone for 4 years or more. And even if the original was very very lacking (no apps, just webapps, no video, no copy paste, no file system, etc.) it captured the imagination and Apple iterated. And Google (and hardware partners) iterated in lockstep.

And now both are reinventing the wheel in lockstep. Other than foldables, we have not seen an innovation in this space for a long time.

I didn’t blame it on lack of apps, per se. Rather on the sales(wo)men selling it as such. The lack of apps never bothered me. Even these days, I rarely use apps (usually only 3-4) and I venture most people use less than 20 in any given month. Lack of apps doesn’t matter if all the apps in the store are mostly junk, or are only used rarely, if at all, once downloaded.

> The windows phone was a phone first, and a computer second. It would try to allow you to have access to the phone for as long as possible. Android and iPhone had no native battery saving features at the time, but windows phone did! It was great for those of us who went without power for extended periods of time.

You literally spent half of your comment discussing one feature, and explaining that windows phone was a phone first and a computer second.

That’s why it failed. Smartphones are obviously used as computers almost all the time, and the phone is a legacy feature.

I would venture that it wasn’t so obvious at the time. I liked that my phone lasted as a phone long into the night (I was usually the only one with a working phone to call a cab). These days, you are correct. I can call a cab from an app in my phone, message support about a package, etc. back in those days though, a phone as a phone was very much a requirement for everyday living.

It was completely obvious at the time that people were buying smartphones because of the computer and not the phone.

Otherwise they wouldn’t have caught on.

I bought it for the phone, camera and music.

Check your timeline: Apple bought NeXT, then Steve Jobs returned, not the other way around.

There are many reasons why NeXT beat out BeOS. NeXT spent years making NS ready for the enterprise. Be OS was a great technology demo, but it had yet to be battle tested.

NextStep would have been a great example of how better products often fail. Getting sold to Apple was not at the top of our list of successful exit strategies.

Posts mentioning WordStar always make me smile. My father, a 68 y.o. C dev, uses WordStar to this day and always tells me to switch to it from whatever I'm using.

:-) I used WordStar back in the 80s to write BBC BASIC and 6502/Z80 assembly.

Two first impression:

- It's all about product market failure. Not a "better" car that often breaks down.

- The products are pretty much all software, or things which live or die by network & fashion effects. There are no better mouse traps here. (+1 to the other comment about the many basic failings of the G4 cube.)

I agree on everything except Windows phone. It was terrible compared to Android & iOS.

I thought it was great! Notification defaults, snappy, decent architecture. But network effects dictated that three platforms were too many.

I think TFA misses the main thing that made Windows Phone both fantastic and not competitive.

They were selling an interpersonal communication device, and the organizing principle was a Contact. It demoed terribly because without your personal contacts loaded the OS made no sense. WITH your contacts loaded it was magic - you pinned your boss or your mother or your friend to the home screen, and it showed you every communication with that particular person across all channels. You spent some of your time at the OS level (not in a particular app) and most of your time not on your phone at all.

IOS and Android were selling a pocket computer for media consumption. The organizing principle is the App. They demoed great, because Apps demo great without personalization.

Windows Phone failed because they didn't take apps seriously. The devices were insanely underpowered, and App Stores became OS-specific walled gardens. No one was going to build a third version or their app when it was annoying already to build two.

Windows didn't take apps seriously because they took the category name "Phone" very literally and positioned themselves around purposeful person-to-person communication. They failed to understand that the App Store revenue stream was actually what would keep the product line afloat and they had nothing similarly high-margin to replace it with. For people who still wanted to do that, it was amazing... but what most people wanted was a pocket computer called a "phone" that would be used to consume media, some of which came from their friends (not any particular friend) and some of which didn't.

> you pinned your boss or your mother or your friend to the home screen

I’m still surprised that iOS can’t do this! Instead of one tap to text or call a contact, you have to launch the appropriate app and find the right person in a list.

you can do this now with the contacts widget.

Just search for the contact from the Home Screen.

Zune sucked and it was good for the ecosystem that it disappeared.

I actually really enjoyed the Zune HD, the windows Music app was awesome, I had the dock and could just pop it into the dock and play movies. The menu system flowed nicely. I do believe it was one of the first devices I saw with an OLED screen, and at the time, it blew me away. It beat the iPod in probably every way, just wasn't enough to get mass market.

Amiga.

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